The Alexander Legend in Central Asia

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THE ALEXANDER LEGEND IN CENTRAL ASIA survivors, two men and their wives, took refuge in a fertile valley hemmed in on every side by lofty mountains and impenetrable forests: it was called Ergene Qun, i.e. 'Steep Cliff'. As time went by, the descendants of those two persons had so increased and multiplied that the valley was too small to contain them all; and they deliberated together as to the means of finding some egress into the outside world. In a certain part of the mountains there was an iron mine. Gathering great quantities of wood and charcoal they placed them at the foot of the bluff where the mine was situated. Next they slaughtered seventy head of oxen and horses and fashioned seventy pairs of bellows out of their hides. Then setting fire to the wood and charcoal they blew all seventy pairs of bellows simultaneously and, the fierce heat causing the iron ore to melt, there was formed an outlet through which they made their way down to the broad plains below. The Ergene Qun legend, like so much else in their culture, would seem to have been borrowed by the Mongols from their Turkish predecessors. The traditions of the T'u-chiieh, as the early Turks are called by the Chinese, speak of a mountain cavern in which their first ancestor with the she-wolf, his wife, sought refuge from their enemies. Through this cavern they passed on to a grassy plain, several Ioo ii in circumference, where their descendants lived for many generations until they emerged from the cavern to settle on the southern slopes of the Altai.32 In both these versions, in fact, we have the realization of the prophecy made in the Legend that in the fullness of time the people of Gog and Magog - Huns, Turks or Mongols - will burst forth from their mountain prison and overrun the outside world. The history of the names Gog and Magog is extremely curious. In Genesis33 Magog is mentioned as one of the sons of Japhet, and the name has been taken as referring to the region south of the Caucasus corresponding to Eastern and Northern Armenia. In Ezekiel34 we read how Gog, of the land of Magog, will come from his place out of the uttermost parts of the north, he and many peoples with him, 'all of them riding upon horses, a great company and a mighty army'. We hear now for the first time of Gog, and Magog has become his kingdom, but is no longer south of the Caucasus. Indeed Ezekiel's description of the invasion of Gog has been seen as an echo of the invasion of the Cimmerians, who came 223 This content downloaded from 71.172.230.205 on Fri, 22 Mar 2013 18:32:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
THE ALEXANDER LEGEND IN CENTRAL ASIA southwards from the steppes through the pass of Darial towards the end of the eighth century B.c.35 Finally in Revelation36 Gog and Magog are represented as the nations that shall be gathered together by Satan upon his release from prison at the end of a thousand years. And so it came about that they were afterwards identified with the various nomad peoples: with the Huns in the Christian Legend concerning Alexander, with the Turks and with the Mongols; and the site of Alexander's gate, originally in the Central Caucasus, was constantly moved northwards and eastwards to match the changed identity of Gog and Magog.37 We come now to Alexander's journey into the Land of Darkness, which, as we have seen, was transferred from the Romance to the Christian Legend. The Land of Darkness was not a purely mythical country; it is the name given in medieval, and perhaps in earlier times, to the sub-arctic regions of what is now the U.S.S.R. When entering it Alexander orders his followers to take with them sheasses that were suckling foals, leaving the foals behind them so that the animals might find their way back for the sake of their young ones.38 The story passed into Rashid al-Din's version of the Legend of Oghuz, the eponymous ancestor of the Oghuz Turks. Oghuz and his companions enter Qaranghuluq, i.e. the Land of Darkness, mounted on four mares and nine she-asses whose young ones had been tethered on the border.39 The story was known to Marco Polo also. He speaks of 'a province called Darkness' far to the north of King Conchi's kingdom, i.e. the territory of the White Horde in what is now Central Kazakhstan, and tells us, as though it were a matter of sober fact, how the Tartars penetrate into this province, where 'the sun, the moon, and the stars never appear ..., but it is always as dark as with us in the twilight'. They go there, he says, 'on mares that have foals, and these foals they leave on the confines of this land; in this way the mares return to their foals, being better able to find their way than men.'40 The transmitters of these tales must, as has already been indicated, have been the Nestorians, who before the advent of Islam had spread the Christian faith across the whole breadth of Asia.41 The founder of this sect was Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople whose teachings about the two natures of Christ were condemned by the Council of Ephesus in 43 I1. The Nestorians organized themselves into a church in Syria in 435 and afterwards 224 This content downloaded from 71.172.230.205 on Fri, 22 Mar 2013 18:32:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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The Alexander Legend in Central Asia

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